New Book: Warp Speed, Maybe

The new Star Trek movie opens this week, so it’s a good time to ponder the science of space exploration. For example, what would be better for faster-than-light interstellar travel? Warp drive or wormholes? The new book, Frontiers of Propulsion Science, may have the answer. At least in theory.

The topics covered in this book — from space drive to gravity shields — will sound familiar to fans of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program, a novel – and some might say controversial – research effort that provided modest funding for far-out ideas. Many of the papers in this book grew out of work supported under this program.

But this may not be the book for daydream believers.Frontiers of Propulsion Science is a thoughtful contribution to the dynamic debate over the age-old question: how crazy is too crazy? While it may include far-reaching ideas for extracting energy from the quantum vacuum and methods of gravity control, a number of the chapters are, in fact, dedicated to debunking claims. Nor is this book for the casual reader: it’s a 739-page collection of technical and scientific papers aimed at scientists and university students.

Danger Room recently interviewed the book’s editors — Marc Millis, who headed NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project, and Eric Davis, a Senior Research Physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (and the CEO of Warp Drive Metrics) – to get their views on how to approach far-out ideas.

Danger Room: What was the motivation behind this book?Why now?

Millis: After seeing various researchers tackling the challenge of revolutionary spaceflight, it became clear that the community needed a single defining reference on the status and opportunities. There was too much ‘noise’ and not enough ‘signal.’ It was also clear that the all-too-easily sensationalized aspects of the quest for interstellar flight were making it difficult to convey the serious nature behind the work. An excellent example of that tainting is your article “Among the Fringe.”

And then too, there were too many conference papers that were just sales-pitches rather than research progress. Not enough attention was placed on connecting the high-quality works already in the peer-reviewed literature to spaceflight goals.

To clear the way for progress, my colleagues and I decided to compile this one document covering the status, issues, and unresolved questions behind a variety of known concepts, and to link the ideal goals back to real physics details. To the extent possible, we endeavored to treat these subjects impartially; showing both their visionary relevance and their critical issues. The intent was to create a document that other researchers could use as a reliable starting point for productive research – chipping away at the issues and unknowns that might one day enable practical interstellar flight.

Danger Room: What do you think should be the role of government agencies, such as NASA or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in funding research in these areas?

Millis: Before answering, I must make it clear that I’m conducting this interview representing myself, and my Tau Zero Foundation, independent of NASA. Either way, it would be inappropriate for me to “advocate” for government support, and that’s not what I’m doing. Also, rather than lamenting on how things ‘should be’ – on who should support what – I must instead work with the options before me. It is more productive to alter one’s own course than to expect organizations to alter theirs – even if they should.

Here is my situation: From time to time and especially on my own time, I’ve been able to push the envelope in my NASA day-job. Presently, NASA has been directed to place top priority on “Apollo on Steroids” while funding has been described as “Apollo on food stamps.” This means that NASA has had to cut the research that sustains technological prowess in favor of picking up where Apollo left off. During Apollo, human spaceflight and technological prowess went hand-in-hand. Over a quarter-century later, that is no longer the case.

The other thing I learned is that the researchers who can be visionary and honestly rigorous at the same time are a rare breed. It is easier for me to find and get volunteer help from such individuals via my Tau Zero Foundation than through my government job. The bottom line is that I have to expand beyond my day-job to do what I’m best with – extending the edge of knowledge toward revolutionary spaceflight.

DR: What about private money?

Millis: Of those activities I knew, it appeared that roughly three times more private funding was supplied to “propulsion physics” in the late 1990’s than by the Government. As one example, the test of Podkletnov’s “gravity shielding” claim was completed by George Hathaway in Canada via private sponsorship, whereas the NASA funded effort in Huntsville was never completed. (By the way, Hathaway’s results, published in the same peer-reviewed journal as the original claim, showed no “gravity shielding” even having 50 times the sensitivity and the assistance of Podkletnov himself.)

The flip side of private sponsorship is that few of them publish results. Private ventures tend to be, well, private. Hathaway’s work was an exception that served the greater good.

DR: It’s interesting to juxtapose the futuristic ideas outlined in this book with NASA’s rather modest space travel plans. Even if there were the potential for a breakthrough in some area of propulsion, where would it fit in?

Millis: Again, I must invoke the caveat that I am NOT representing NASA. Here I share the opinion voiced in the on-line essay “Plan-B for Outer Space” of Russell Saunders, Jr. (pseudonym). In short, the essay states that NASA’s Human Spaceflight is experiencing the classic “pride before the fall” typical of mature organizations when faced with new challenges. The new challenges include the impressive abilities of robotic space probes, entrepreneurial joyrides, and changing motivations. In the 1950’s & 60’s the threat was the Soviet Union.

Today, the threat is the very habitability of Earth, be it from pollution, doomsday asteroids, or war. And today, we’re evolving from international competition to collaboration. Following history’s patterns, the future could be brighter as the paradigm shifts from just one space program to many specialized efforts. For example, while entrepreneurs bring the thrill of spaceflight to the masses (with the wealthy going first during the costly dangerous phase), governments could collaborate on the large-scale human spaceflight and on protecting Earth.

DR: In your chapter on faster-than-light interstellar travel, you discuss the physics of this idea, and whether such travel might be plausible. If I understand correctly, you say that traversable wormholes make more sense than warp drives. Why?

Davis: In comparing the intricacies of traversable wormhole physics with warp drive physics, I discovered in the published research literature that the warp drive concept suffers far more serious technical issues compared with traversable wormholes even though both FTL (faster-than-light) concepts are beyond our present ability to implement in practice.

For example, there is the problem that warp drives require an extremely large amount of negative energy just to propel a spacecraft at the same speed that a garden snail crawls, which is far, far below the speed of light. So you have to pump in an enormous amount of negative energy just to propel a spacecraft far below light speed using a warp drive concept.

While a traversable wormhole throat of 1-meter diameter requires about 21 orders of magnitude more negative energy to construct, its FTL capability remains intact. In fact, we can shrink a wormhole throat down to an arbitrarily small submicroscopic size, thus dramatically lowering the amount of negative energy required, and it will still retain its FTL capability.

This makes it more plausible to consider traversable wormholes for further practical exploration even for plausible laboratory experiments. Dr. Richard Obousy, previously at Baylor University, recently published a theoretical proposal,“Warp Drive: A New Approach,” in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, that exploits the vacuum energy of extra-space dimensions found in the higher dimensional quantum gravity theories to overcome the warp drive energy problem.

Another rather difficult technical problem with warp drives is that the warp bubble surrounding the spacecraft is not causally connected to the spacecraft, which makes controlling the warp drive impossible to do. There are several proposals to overcome this, but they are still a work in progress.

DR: I was intrigued by one of the chapters on lifters (a device that can produce thrust with no moving parts), and the authors’ statement about how there was so little solid data. Is that something generalizable to other areas examined in this book?

Davis: No, I don’t think one should generalize that to the other topics explored in the book because they have been rigorously studied over the years by many different scientists. And there is no general hesitancy toward conducting experiments by scientists. There is a larger question that looms in this regard: “Does a particular concept have a rigorous hypothesis or theory worth testing in the lab?” This question addresses whether any concept is testable. According to the scientific method, experiment must be driven by hypothesis, or in absence of a hypothesis, one uses laboratory empirical studies to produce a hypothesis. There are an enormous amount of concepts floating around out there and most of them do not have a testable hypothesis. That makes it very difficult for any serious scientist to
justify doing experiments.

To do a lab experiment without a working hypothesis is like operating blind, you don’t know where you are going to end up and that can drive up the cost of doing experiments. The lifters concept never had a single widely accepted testable hypothesis over its 80+ year history. Historically there were a large number of mostly exotic physics proposals that were made by numerous advocates, but no one ever published their hypothesis in a peer-review journal. There was a small number of sporadic empirical studies performed on lifters, but they were extremely limited in scope and vision, thus hampering the development of a consistent testable hypothesis.

The authors of the two lifters chapters in our book performed their experiments with an eye toward broadening the scope of their empirical studies far beyond what had been accomplished in the past. They left virtually no stone unturned.

DR: The chapter on “Null Tests of ‘Free Energy’ Claims” comes to rather pessimistic conclusions about a number of the devices tested. What was the reaction from the inventors?

Davis: In such cases, every effort is made to determine just what the artifact or error is in the original claimant’s position, and, in rare cases, once understood, the inventor, though disappointed, goes back to the drawing board to determine whether there remains any hope for his concept.

Often, however, the inventor holds on to his original belief, attacks the independent evaluation process as being flawed, and continues to hype his claim, a sure indicator of the pathological science position that is not self-corrective. In this case, as time passes and no positive contribution to the energy field emerges, the process of independent evaluation becomes more and more appreciated as unbiased.

DR: This book grows out of an area that has attracted both ardent fans and severe critics. What has been the reaction from colleagues, either supportive or critical?

Davis: So far I have received no feedback from colleagues. The book just came out so it will take some time for it to circulate within the scientific community.